Say It With Flowers

by Gladys Mitchell

  “The Stone!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Stone of Sacrifice! That’s where it was done!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” (A white lie, but Dame Beatrice felt that it was completely justified.)

  “I saw him there with Miss Beads!”

  “Whom did you see?”

  “That strange, tall man in sandals and a panama hat.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “Oh, no. It was too evidently an assignment that was being kept. As I knew that the man was married, I felt that my presence might be an embarrassment to both of them. Also, as a Churchwoman (sometimes, I believe, known as the vicar’s right hand), I should have felt greatly embarrassed myself if I had remained a spectator of what was tantamount to an immoral love-tryst.”

  “What gave you the impression that it was anything of the kind?”

  “Both faces wore an expression of guilt and defiance.”

  “And from this you deduced . . .?”

  “Exactly; so I lost no time in making myself scarce. I was fortunate. I believe I escaped seeing two dreadful sins committed.”

  “The second of these being . . .?”

  “Murder, Dame Beatrice; no less.”

  “And when was this?”

  “I should have to look up in my diary. Quite a little while ago—several weeks—it would have been. Excuse me. I’ll go and get it. I keep it on my bedside table and confide in it each night when I go to bed.”

  She returned with a pretentious volume. It had a brass clasp which she unlocked with a tiny key kept on a chain around her neck. Dame Beatrice had always supposed that the appendage to this chain would prove to be a small gold cross and was interested to learn that it was not.

  Iona Platt turned back the pages and found the one she wanted. The date of the meeting between Phlox Carmichael and Hilary Beads was Wednesday, May 22nd.

  “At what time of day did this meeting take place?” enquired Dame Beatrice.

  “Oh, at about half-past six. The vicar keeps Cathedral times for week-day evensong, and I had attended it at three-thirty, was free by a quarter-past four, came back here for some tea, began a little work, and then realised that I was short of fern.”

  “Fern?”

  “For my shadow-pictures, you know. So I popped along to the Manor woods to re-equip myself and—there they were.”

  “So that was that,” said Dame Beatrice to Laura when she returned to the Stone House. “I see no point in interviewing the Huckleberry Finn of these regions, Harvey Load.”

  “Neither do I. What do we do next? Visit the Stone of Sacrifice and look for clues?”

  “Clues will have disappeared by now, even supposing that any existed, but it might be interesting to visit the Stone.”

  “Incidentally, why is this called the Stone House? Is there any connection?”

  “I have never thought about it, but the question I find rather stimulating. I must look into the matter with Mr. Pierce. He is our foremost authority upon the local history.”

  “There’s the curator of the Bossbury museum, too—not to mention the Culminster man.”

  “Very true. We will interrogate both. Tomorrow, then, we will take another look at the Stone of Sacrifice. It is some time since I have seen it.”

  “Before my time, anyway,” said Laura. “As far as I know, you’ve never been near it since I came here—and that’s some years ago!”

  “Shades of Felicity Broome, Aubrey Harringay, James Redsey, Rupert Sethleigh, and the monumental, although strangely nervous, Mrs. Bryce Harringay of shocking and rewarding memory,” said Dame Beatrice, in the quietly gloating tones of rich reminiscence.

  “Really? Tell me more.”

  “At another time I shall be happy to do so. Fortunately, since the Manor Park is open to the public, we need acquaint no one with our intention to visit it. Be prepared to accompany me at ten tomorrow morning.”

  The park of the Manor House, which lay some two miles out of the village, was thickly wooded, being, in point of fact, a segment cut (probably illegally, if the truth were known) from the New Forest itself. Although, since the death of the last owner, the park had been acquired by the County and the house permitted to fall into decay, the property had never become a popular playground, even for the village children. This was not surprising. An eerie gloom enveloped the place, even in the sunniest weather, and a previous owner had not improved the heavy, almost doom-laden atmosphere by planting an inner circle of pine trees around the Stone of Sacrifice.

  Laura and Dame Beatrice made the journey to the wicket-gate (the only public entrance to the park) by car, and left it parked on a grassy verge at the side of the road while they continued their pilgrimage on foot. Laura pushed open the wicket-gate and held it open for her employer to pass through, and then latched it carefully before following Dame Beatrice along the narrow, winding path between the trees.

  “Gosh!” she said, as the great deciduous woods appeared to close in on them, “I don’t wonder people don’t come here very much. I suppose the vicarage is about the nearest house to this, by a short cut, isn’t it? Wonder how they like being so close?”

  “There are strange and ghostly stories,” said Dame Beatrice, in a sepulchral tone which caused her graceless secretary to laugh. This laugh, however, “must have hit the trunk of a tree or something,” said the startled Laura, for it came back at her like that of a disembodied spirit. It impressed her so much that she followed in silence, on the leaf-mould dampness of the path, until they emerged into a small circular clearing where, encircled by the rigid trunks of the pine trees, was the infamous Stone of Sacrifice.

  “Was it really used for human sacrifices?” asked Laura, gazing at the flat-topped, triangular mass of granite. “I wonder where it came from?”

  “Probably from Glamorgan or Milford Haven. It has an affinity, I am told, with the so-called Altar Stone of Stonehenge. There is a theory, too, which was propounded to me once by the curator at Culminster, that this circle of pines was planted in the eighteenth century by a friend of William Stukeley to mark the monoliths which once stood there, and which, at some time, had been carted away for building purposes. I am pretty sure there is one forming the lintel of Miss Platt’s cottage, for example.”

  “You know,” said Laura, stepping forward and running her finger-tips over the rough and oddly chilly surface of the Stone, as it crouched among the pines like some eyeless monster, “all you say makes me think of Phlox Carmichael. That sort of thing—sacred rites and mystic incantations and so forth—seems right up his street.”

  “So much so,” said Dame Beatrice, “that he may also know more than he should about the interior of the Manor House.”

  Laura’s eyes widened.

  “You don’t think that!” she said. “Have you ever been inside the house?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have—and not by invitation either, so far as my memory serves me,” said Dame Beatrice. “And that reminds me—although I don’t know why it should—that I must reward little Eustace Trumble for his information about the drowning of the handbag.”

  “ ‘We must punctually pay our spies, or we shall get no information,’ ” quoted Laura solemnly. “Half a dollar should do it.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Two Ladies Go for a Swim

  “The World was made to be inhabited by Beasts, but studied and contemplated by Man.”

  Ibid (Section 13)

  * * *

  DAME BEATRICE sent Laura home to the Stone House while she herself visited the vicarage. This time she found the Reverend Gascony Pierce in residence. This was lucky, as she felt sure that he would know more about the activities of the Carmichaels on their visits to Wandles Parva than would Veronica.

  She opened the conversation by enquiring after the vicar’s Alpines, a fine collection which he had inherited from his predecessor, an eccentric, absent-minded man named Broome.

  “
Nicely, nicely,” said Mr. Pierce. “What a pity we were not given the opportunity of purchasing some of the very fine specimens they used to have at the Hall, though! I understand that it was one of the finest collections in the country.”

  “The Hall?—oh, yes, the Manor House, of course. Laura and I have just been having a look at the park.”

  “And at that terrifying and disgusting Stone of Sacrifice, I imagine?”

  “Oh, yes. Laura, who had not seen it before, (I’m sure I don’t know why), was greatly impressed. She wondered whether there was any possible suggestion of a connection between it and my house, which, after all, is only partly faced with stone.”

  “I have never heard of any connection. Strangely enough, Carmichael once asked me the same thing, I remember, when he was here for the first time. As soon as I learned that he was interested in (among many other things) prehistory, I mentioned the Stone of Sacrifice to him and took him along to have a look at it, but I don’t think he ever went again.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Oh, he would have mentioned it. He is a great talker and used to describe to us all their little expeditions and experiments. The old tower fascinated him, though. By the way, I’ve acquired some Alpine campions, soldanella, and the aromatic wormwood to add to my erica and my lady’s-slipper orchis and my saxifrages, and I really need somebody to admire them.”

  Glad to close the subject of Phlox Carmichael and the Manor House, Dame Beatrice duly admired the new Alpines, promised the vicar a gift of a plant of yellow violet, and found George with the car at the vicarage gates.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered, George. I was quite prepared for a meditative walk,” observed his employer.

  “Thank you, madam,” said George, with the wooden expression he assumed to indicate disapproval. “Mrs. Gavin suggested I return for you, but I should have done so in any case.”

  “George, you talk too much.”

  “Very good, madam.” George relaxed his features, tucked her in, and drove her home. Very early next morning Laura woke up, tiptoed into the dressingroom where her son had his cot, found him peacefully asleep, and tiptoed back again. She looked out of the window, stretched her fine limbs, and thought of her morning bath. The time was just after five o’clock and it seemed anti-social to risk waking other people by rushing water into the bath and gurgling it out again, so, very reluctantly, she was considering a return to the bed she had just left, when another idea struck her.

  She slipped trousers and a heavy sweater over her pyjamas, pulled on socks and tennis shoes, picked up a towel, and made her way cautiously downstairs. She let herself out by the side door and was soon at the garage. Here she retrieved her motor-scooter, pushed it down to the gate so that no sound of its engine should disturb the household, started it up, and rode as far as the wicket-gate path which led to the Stone of Sacrifice and the Manor House.

  She had anticipated that the walk between the trees would be less eerie in the early morning than it had been in the early evening, but this, she discovered, was not the case. She was not in the least fanciful (although, in some respects, she was extremely imaginative), but a long line of Scottish ancestors—she had been born into Clan Menzies, which, although admittedly of Lowland origin, has been Highland since the time of Alexander I—had bred in her some powerful and alarming superstitions and a tendency to smell the uncanny long before an Englishwoman would have suspected its presence.

  The path between the trees, therefore, she traversed at a jog trot, although her tennis shoes had little grip on the damp, deep leaf-mould. She looked neither to right nor to left and was soon in sight of the Stone. Here Laura stopped dead in her tracks. Lying face downward on the Stone, his head towards the apex of its triangular top, his legs spread-eagled so that one foot pointed directly towards each of the angles at the base, was a man whom she had not the slightest difficulty in recognising as Phlox Carmichael.

  Laura had to make a lightning decision. She made it. She stepped to her right and was hidden—“swallowed-up” was the way she put it to herself—by the closely-growing trees. There she thought the position out again, but decided that she had done the right thing. She waited as long as her impetuous nature would allow her to do so, and then crept onwards towards the Stone but still in the shelter of the trees. From the base of the triangle on which he was lying she contrived to obtain another glimpse of Phlox. As far as she could see, he was in exactly the same position as that in which she had first seen him, so she not only did not loiter but actually hurried past the spot. Phlox did not move.

  Calm, and ineffably inviting, the lake, whose existence she had hoped for and yet had not wholly expected, gleamed in an enchanting setting of reeds and willows. Laura had a deep sense of purpose. Having come prepared to swim, she was determined to swim, no matter how many possibly murderous Carmichaels were infesting the grounds of the Manor House. In the shelter afforded by a great bed of reeds, she stripped and, with mud squelching between her strong toes, she entered the water. The lake was nowhere more than four feet deep, but that sufficed to make swimming a pleasure.

  After she had warmed up, Laura floated on her back and studied the environs of the lake. It was not far from the house, the only original feature of which, so far as she could judge, was the tall observation tower put up by a previous owner in the eighteenth century.

  “Must be a marvellous view from the top,” she thought, turning over in the water and paddling idly up the length of the lake. “Might be an idea to try to get up there at some time. And thinking of time . . .” she glanced at her watch, an expensive, waterproof, sub-aqua affair which she had bought for under-water swimming at the same time as she had purchased the rest of what she called her Hans Hass kit—“it might be as well if I got out now.”

  In the enjoyment of her swim she had forgotten Phlox Carmichael, and she was dried and dressed before she remembered him again. It occurred to her that two things about him that morning were odd: he had returned to Wandles rather soon after his last visit and he was in the park of the Manor House alone; of Marigold there had been no sign.

  She finished dressing and made a devious approach to the Stone. Phlox had gone. Laura thereupon took to the path again and, her damp towel rolled up and tucked under her arm, strode rapidly towards the wicket-gate to find Phlox leaning on it. He moved away and opened it for her.

  “Well, well! Like myself you are up bright and early,” he said. “From the mermaid dampness of your hair and the towel under your arm, I deduce that you have been bathing in the lake. A trifle cold, was it not?”

  “Just at first, but you soon warm up,” said Laura. “Are you staying at the vicarage again?”

  “Well, yes. Rather sad for me, really. Marigold has had to go into hospital and our floating home is so lonely without her that I came down here last night in the hope that the good Pierces could find room for me for a bit.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Laura perfunctorily. “I hope your sister isn’t seriously ill.”

  “I think not. I think not. I’ve been meaning to have that gang-plank of ours repaired these many moons. Now it must most certainly be done.”

  “Oh, it was an accident, then?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “What seems to be the damage?—to your sister, I mean.”

  “Shock, mostly, they seem to think. She is to be kept under observation for a week. She swallowed rather a lot of the river, too. I had quite a job to fish her out. There are only two or three feet of water between our boat and the bank, you see. But perhaps you would like to be trotting along? Your hair is extremely wet and you may take cold.”

  “How right you are,” said Laura. “So long, then. Be seeing you!” She retrieved her motor-scooter and rode away, thinking furiously, and got back to the Stone House in plenty of time for a bath before breakfast.

  “The lake?” said Dame Beatrice later. “It is an innovation since I was last inside the house. The last owner had it made just b
efore the financial disaster which compelled him to make over the property to the County authorities.”

  “It’s in pretty good order,” said Laura. “Muddy round the edges, and as natural-seeming a pool as one could wish for. I suppose I was contravening a bye-law by swimming in it, but that couldn’t be helped. Incidentally, I was not the only occupant of the park this morning. Phlox Carmichael was there. He was lying stretched out on the Stone. I think it was some sort of religious gesture on his part, but what the actual religion was I’d be very hard put to it to say.”

  “Where was his sister?” Dame Beatrice demanded.

  “Oh, she’s in hospital. That’s why he’s down here again—according to him. That rotten gang-plank of theirs broke, it seems, and deposited Marigold in the somewhat murky Thames. It appears that he had quite a job to get her out, there being less than three feet of water between their boat and the shore.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “That did not transpire because I never thought to ask. Does it matter?”

  “It matters a good deal if he tried to murder her.”

  “You don’t really think that?” asked Laura, “He’s so fond of her, I understood.”

  Dame Beatrice shrugged.

  “There is not much of which our friend is incapable,” she said. “Robert had better get his policemen to go along to that house-boat. Further, I think that the red-herring of the Hamble River should be disregarded and that we should concentrate our attention upon the environs of the Manor House.”

  “We could at least look at the Hamble River,” Laura suggested. “There might be all sorts of possibilities.”

  “There speaks the yachtswoman. Very well. We will see whether there is any evidence there. Get me Robert on the telephone, please, when you have finished your breakfast.”

  The Hamble River was, as usual, crowded with boats. Even the optimistic Laura could not see how any information was to be gained there.

  “It’s hopeless,” she said, surveying the crowded moorings. “I just wouldn’t know where to start. What a pity! Oh, well, let’s get back to Wandles. Why is it called Wandles, by the way?”